Kristy Tanguay ’99

When Kristy Tanguay sits at her desk at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., sifting through laborrelated legislation and voting records, there’s a part of her that’s far away in northern New Hampshire. In the town where she grew up, the breeze often carried the distinctive odor of the nearby paper mills. When Tanguay was 6, some of her relatives and neighbors went on strike to protest a pay cut.

She didn’t realize how this affected her until her senior politics seminar on the theory of justice. That same year, a professor gave her a book on Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. “During the Depression, she saw unfair labor practices as an underlying cause of poverty and suffering, and worked through nonviolent means to defeat those practices,” Tanguay says. She started working for the AFL-CIO after earning her master’s degree in labor relations at the University of Massachusetts. As a campaign researcher and writer, she researches legislation and educates workers on proposals affecting overtime pay, workplace safety and family leave. “Most people are too busy with their dayto- day lives to focus on what’s happening in D.C.,” she says. “When they understand the issues, they’re able to call their congressional representatives on their own and help defeat a bad bill or pass one that’s going to improve their quality of life.”